Is ‘Game of Thrones’ Final Season Teasing a Major Location’s Fall?

Even if it takes us until 2019 to get there, Game of Thrones is placing every card on the table for its final season. The White Walkers are loose and the endgame fast approaching, and – if John Bradley is to be believed – we have serious reason to fear that major characters will be scattered all over the map this year.

Series star John Bradley offered a cryptic bit of intel on the eighth and final season to TVGuide; namely that “Each of the characters this year is placed in a completely alien environment at some point in the season that they’ve never been placed in before.” On the one hand, his words could be taken to imply that each character finds themselves in unfamiliar situations, but more likely that everyone will end up leaving the last locations we saw them in. The full quote, for context:

These characters are so detailed and so rich, you can feel that you’ve got a pretty good handle on your character. You can predict how your character will react in any given circumstance, but when you place these characters in a new environment, it’s always putting them under a microscope, and you constantly have to reexamine your character. Each of the characters this year is placed in a completely alien environment at some point in the season that they’ve never been placed in before. The thrill is seeing how they react to it and how they respond… This season, I think, more than any other is stretching these characters.

There are a few interpretations to unpack here. Most urgently, perhaps, is that the Night King’s army finally breached The Wall in Season 7’s finale, and will likely come upon the major northern locations first. Winterfell is certainly high among those targets, and if we were to imagine anything displacing Sansa, Arya, Bran and Sam to “completely alien environments” in Season 8, it might be the destruction of their ancestral home. Similar concerns can be raised about King’s Landing, given that Queen Cersei rarely travels outside the city for any reason, and Season 1 Daenerys saw a vision of a snow-ravaged throne room.

It’s always possible Bradley didn’t mean his comments so literally, or that certain characters might change locations one at a time (Bran can also “travel” anywhere in history), but should we be worried for any of our favorite locations when Game of Thrones returns in 2019?